Professor at the Wharton School · Author of Co-Intelligence · Writes One Useful Thing
Ethan Mollick is a professor at the Wharton School whose research turned toward generative AI early and in public (Wharton faculty profile). His distinguishing habit is running small, fast, legible experiments — give a task to a model, publish what happened, including when it went badly — rather than issuing predictions.
His book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI was a New York Times bestseller and was named a book of the year by both The Economist and the Financial Times (Penguin Random House). Its central argument is to treat AI as a co-worker, co-teacher and coach rather than a tool or an oracle. He publishes One Useful Thing on Substack, which is where the experiments land first.
Reception has been broadly positive on practicality — reviewers repeatedly note that the book assumes no technical background and is genuinely usable by non-specialists. The recurring criticism is of tone rather than accuracy: one reviewer found its conclusions "rather idealistic", and an academic review worried it underweights how easily students and companies will use AI to replace learning rather than augment it. Both are opinions from individual reviewers, not a consensus verdict. Read him for method; supply your own scepticism about pace.
Everything above is drawn from these public sources. Last reviewed 8 August 2026. Links open on the publisher's own site.
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